SEO Or PPC

Is SEO On It's Death Bed?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is dead, long live Pay Per Click (PPC); at least this is the view of some web designers. Short-sighted nay-sayers have been proclaiming the death or end of various things since words were invented. Or were Words discovered?

Nothing heavier than air will never fly. Man will never reach the moon. Radio is dead. Just as these statements were and are wrong so is the funeral for SEO premature.

PPC is being touted as the best method to get a site noticed. However, PPC is becoming more and more expensive. If you have a large company with several million dollars for advertising, a few hundred thousand for web site advertising is affordable. But, if you are a small company with only 10 to 80 thousand dollars to spend, it isn’t good business to spend it all on PPC. With keywords costing from .05 cents to $10.00 dollars per click, PPC costs can quickly destroy a small business’ advertising budget. And, what about those people that don’t use the Internet and watch TV or listen to the Radio?

Some Will Thrive:
Just as radio still lives alongside of television so will SEO continue and even thrive. SEO is a relative inexpensive way to gain Internet exposure and as long as search engines allow free listings, SEO will continue to be important. But, what if all search engines go to PPC and paid listings? Then the Internet will begin its downfall because more businesses would rather stay local than go global, especially as PPC and listing rates skyrocket.

You must remember that regardless of how well liked you site is by search engines, it’s the viewers that make the site successful. As with any other media, it’s not who finds your site but who buys from your site that really counts.

For this reason proper SEO methods will not die. If SEO is correctly done with long-term benefits in mind, a site is not only made more search engine friendly but also more user friendly.

The same principles apply to both the user and the search engine:

Good consistent site navigation,
Keywords properly placed in the content,
Well written content,
Fast, easy to read, easy to crawl pages,
Information instead of feature driven pages.

SEO methods that stress the above concepts along with site usability; that improve a site for both the engines and the viewers will continue to evolve. Methods that treat each page as part of the whole, methods that have long-term benefits, these methods will survive and thrive. These methods will also become the expected and demanded SEO approach. Fly-by-nighters are shooting themselves in the foot. They serve as bad examples and speed the education of site owners and administrators.

Some Will Die:
SEO methods that only work for a short time will die out. Methods that deceive and trick search engines do work but usually are detected by the major engines within six months. When detected, the site may suffer drastically reduced page rankings or possibly even be blacklisted. These surface types of SEO methods will continue to disappear as search engines become smarter and as site owners and administrators become more educated in proper SEO techniques.

Conclusion:
PPC can only survive so long as there are free listing alternatives because PPC is seen to offer an advantage to non-paid listings. Remove free listings and PPC rate will become unprofitable, either to the search engines or to the businesses or perhaps both.

Methods that only provide short-term benefits and only optimize for search engines will disappear, but those methods that optimize a site for the viewer as well as the search engines will survive.

Misapplied site optimization tactics will backfire because even if the site does rank well with search engines, it must also provide the expected information to convert viewers into buyers. Having thousands of viewers click through your site must convert to sales; otherwise, any SEO effort is wasted.

If your SEO expert doesn’t improve your site’s content and ease-of-use, he or she is only doing part of the job. When properly done, an optimized site will not only improve search engine rankings but also improve the viewer’s experience.